Mine the Harvest

Wanting to feel a bit nostalgic I decided to fire up Gopher and see if there were still any Gopher servers running out there. Back in the days before the Web had yet to be consolidated from the spinning mass of the proto-planetary internet mass, Gopher was one of the Gems of the Net. Using it you could seamlessly glide from server to server in a more or less hierarchical directory structure. No longer did you have to telnet to individual servers, you could just hop around. This was how surfing really started. Often you really had no idea where you where. And Gopher also allowed you to search – holy crap, this was hot stuff.

Sure – today I could just find a gopher server on Google and connect with Firefox to something like gopher://quux.org/ but this misses the point really as Gopher pre-dated browsers. Hardly nostalgic enough for a purist.

No problem – I’ll just install a gopher client on one of my Linux boxes and use it. Humm, they don’t have one installed by default anymore. Oh well – I can just install it from the repos. Oops, it’s not in the Base, Extras or RPMForge Repos for CentOS. Wow, seriously? Okay, I will just get the rpm for one real quick. Humm – that is not too easy either, dependencies blah blah. Oh – here is one for Debian, I guess I could make it into a RPM with Alien – oh why bother, it is so tiny I will just compile it locally.

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I have really been having some fun with the new OpenSolaris 2008.05 release. It actually prompted me to break down and get a new 500GB SATA drive and do a fresh install of Suse 11 with LVM so I could have more room for virtual machines. My old install was just running out of room and I could not add more VMs, plus hdparm showed the old drive performance was pretty horrid (17MB/sec).

Installing VMware Server 2.0 and getting OpenSolaris to run was a bit challenging though. There are pages on my wiki discussing both and some of the issues I encountered.

Getting VMWare tools to work was a bit challenging. After installing it and restarting X the screen would go black and you are unable to get to a virtual terminal. Quite annoying. I finally found the solution courtesy of a comment by Ankush on this blog.

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The CCNA (Cisco Certified Networking Associate) class I am taking at St. Pete College required a paper and presentation as one of its primary projects. My two lab mates and I decided to have our area of focus be on Linux (yes – surprising I know) and its role in a network environment. The paper and Power Point presentation are here. This was an introductory presentation to enlighten students new to networking or IT on the roles Linux plays in networking and environments such as data center, enterprise and small to medium business. 80% of the audience had no experience with Linux, so this was definitely an introductory talk.

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Last week I configured a VPN running between my house and server at work using OpenVPN. The configuration of OpenVPN on the server and client was extremely simple and I wrote a wiki article on it. I highly recommend looking into this if you need an OpenSource VPN solution. It literally took a few minutes to get is deployed as far as the VPN itself. I suggest you just try the mini how-to for initial deployment and then expand on that as needed.

I did have to compile a kernel module for the tun device on one server which a colleague assisted me with – but it was very straight forward and the steps I took to do so are here (see kernel and module configuration) should you need to do the same. It’s not a step by step how to, but certainly gives the broad overview on what to do. You likely won’t even need this though as most distro’s include the tun device, just do an lsmod and look for it. If not though, compiling the module will generally follow the steps described on the wiki.

Once the VPN was running all kinds of fun things are possible, but the primary reason I did this was to use BackupPC to back up my home PCs. I have another blog post on BackupPC and a wiki on it. I very highly recommend this as a backup solution for both your servers at work and even for personal use.  I think it is superior to Backula or Amanda – though setting it up can be a tad beastly. Once configured though – it is the bomb.

Last week I upgraded the blog software (which drives this wonder of technology blog site) to the latest WordPress 2.5. The upgrade went very well, though there was one database change that caused an issue with comments not showing up correctly in the management interface. It would say there were comments waiting but not display them when you clicked the link. This was due to a new field being added to the wp_comments database which needs to be indexed.

The WordPress forums do have a mention of this, but it is a bit buried and the fix may elude some users. After Googling a bit it was easy to see the issue was due to a database schema change in the wp_comments table.

The solution is simple, and you can do it in the mysql client (for you shell happy guys) or using phpmyadmin.

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